Siyar al-mutaʾakhkhirin 42.29.4

42.29.4

(Look at Blackstone's Commentaries). But would any man choose to write as did Hobbes and Harrington? (I except Algernon Sydney). And would an historian take the long winded, although very sensible, periods of Clarendon's for his model? Would the unequal and inexact Burnet, or the very sensible, but now and then scurrilous Swift, be taken for a pattern in these days in that kind of writing? And shall Harte's History of Charles the Twelfth be reputed legible, although supported by no less a man than a Chesterfield? No, indeed, no. So long as people shall have such books as those that have done so much honor to England — books in which the English have taken the lead of all Europe these forty years, without being equalled by any nation of the world to this day — no one will think of those early authors for his models. Even Dryden, the great Dryden, of whom Pope himself used to say with regret, Virgilium tantum vidi; even Dryden is strangely neglected in an infinity of places; and excepted in his ode to St. Cæcilia, he seems inferior to Pope almost everywhere. It is then in a nation which has soared but of late, that they expect a soaring style, and a soaring performance in a man who never pretended to be a writer, who has translated only from the Persian, and who has translated from it, barely because his purpose could not have been answered any otherwise.